KIT
“Start talking. Now,” Hayes orders, embers of anger reflected in the aquamarine pits of his eyes.
If my heart wasn’t seconds away from bursting out of my chest, the shame would’ve jumpstarted it. “We got into a fight,” I say curtly, and no matter how furious I may be at the situation, the only person to blame right now is me.
Fulton peeks his head out of the door. “I don’t see her,” he relays.
Fuck! She could be anywhere right now. It’s midnight, it’s dark, and Riverside isn’t safe enough for her to be walking around alone at night. I don’t even know if she took her phone, shoes, a jacket, anything.
The roughness of Hayes’ growl chafes my ears, and he digs his phone out of his pocket, the screen illuminating his face. I’ve never seen him so distressed before. Not before a game, not before a big conference, never.
“Her phone’s still here,” he chokes out, and something changes in his irises. That initial outrage, the shock, the confusion—they’ve all amalgamated and shapeshifted into pure fear.
He doesn’t look at any of us but instead stares at the opaque darkness rolling over our doorstep like a foreboding omen. “We need to find her.”
Guilt spumes inside me, threatens to revolt from my stomach. “It’s my fault.”
“I don’t care whose fucking fault it is. We need to find her,” he repeats, his face strained with bulging veins, spit flying from his lower lip.
Gage grabs his keys from off the coffee table. “Should we call the police?”
“You can call them once you’re in your car.” Hayes tosses the rest of the guys their keys, and a scurry of sneaker soles, jacket zippers, and jangling bits of metal follows his instruction. The worst kinds of thoughts pistol through my brain—her encountering a horde of bad people without me there to protect her, her running miles away and never being found again. Maybe she darts into the street and an oncoming car doesn’t see her.
I shouldn’t have raised my voice. I shouldn’t have fought with her. I shouldn’t have gone to visit Saxon.
For as loud and urgent as Hayes’ voice is, the tremor doesn’t go unnoticed. “Everyone split up. We don’t rest until she comes home, got it? We call each other if we hear or see anything.”
“I didn’t hear a car engine,” I pipe up, the tacky saliva in my mouth seeming to proliferate.
Bristol’s eyebrows stitch together. “What?”
“She didn’t get in a car. Wherever she is, she’s on foot.”
Hayes begins to usher everyone out of the house, leaving me and him the last of the group to exit. And it’s then, in this moment, that I realize we’re both panicking over the loss of the most important person in our life.
“Then she’ll be easier to find,” Hayes concludes.
I don’t know how long I’m driving around for. Maybe an hour and a half. It’s silent in the Jeep, void of Faye’s teasing quips—void of her effervescent personality. There’s nothing but unending darkness in front of me, around me, behind me. Even the stars have long fallen from the sky, blanketing our town in funeral-like desolation.
I’ve circled the perimeter of town twice, even followed the less-traveled routes hidden by far-reaching willows, and there’s been no sign of her. I checked the parking lots thoroughly, traversed over rocky, uneven terrain with only my phone flashlight to guide me, spent an hour wanting to tear my hair out and cry and run into my mother’s arms like a little boy. I need to find her. I will find her. Not finding her isn’t an option.
I can’t imagine what will happen if we don’t find her.
I don’t want to. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.
I’m right back at the intersection before the turn into our ice rink. No other car is on my strip of road. The red glow of the stoplight spills over the front of my vehicle, lighting my interior through the reflective surface of the windshield, and the only noise to bring me any sort of comfort is the steady purr of my engine. My fingers wrap tightly around the steering wheel, compounding the pain under my bandaged knuckles. The bleeding must have stopped, but it’s stained a good portion of the gauze.
I need to change it soon if I want to prevent infection. I need to eat. I need to sleep. But I know I won’t be able to do any of that until Faye is safely back in my arms.
If she’s on foot, there’s only so much distance she could’ve traveled. And she doesn’t know Riverside. No shops are open. The only place she knows is…
My bloodshot eyes behold the behemoth arena sitting right beside me, and even though the light is still red, I immediately turn from the middle lane into the parking lot.
I’m not the fastest guy on the team. A lot of my padding slows me down. But I don’t even feel the burn in my thighs or the air rushing out of my lungs when I sprint toward the building.
Please be here. Please.
I jostle the handles on one side of the entrance. Nothing. The small morsel of hope I’ve clung to like my life’s depended on it is slowly slipping through my fingers, kinetic sand that can never hold its shape.
No, no, no. This is my only lead. If she’s not here, I have nothing.
My hand skims the handle on the opposite side, and without even putting any pressure on it, the door creaks open. A sliver. No projection of inside light. But a sliver. And that’s all I need.
Muscle memory carries me through the building that I’ve grown to know as a second home, desperation and fear peddling my legs, the chill from the rink sinking into my skin. I can see my breath swirl out in front of me, and I’m not wearing enough clothes to combat against the perpetually low temperature, but none of that matters.
Because right as I see that tempered glass, my eyes hook onto the small figure sitting on the curb of one of the side openings. I’ve never felt my heart burst with such relief before—it’s almost too much for me to handle. But looking at Faye, unharmed and in one piece, blasts me with a warmth like a varicolored sunrise in the dead of winter, persimmon and purple shades bleeding into one another around an epicenter of gilded sun.
“Faye!” I scream, rushing over to her, ignoring the collision of my hip into the front row of seats.
Her head perks up as she rises to her feet, and my arms immediately bar her in an embrace. I don’t know why I thought she would smell or look different, but she smells and looks like my Faye. She’s shivering in her tiny pajama set, burying herself into the heat of my body, and now I wish I’d brought a jacket with me. I don’t pull away. I’m not ready yet.
“Are you hurt?” I whisper against the crown of her head, inhaling her peach scent—how it still lingers even after a grueling day. The smell of her, the feel of her, just looking at her is like a muscle relaxant. My own slice of heaven that I don’t deserve. The one place I’ll always come back to no matter how far away I am or how much time passes.
“I’m okay,” she says quietly, cheek pressed against my chest.
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been in this position before. I don’t want to repeat it, no matter how familiar it may be. There shouldn’t have to be a reunion with us. We shouldn’t have to be separated in the first place. And I know each of these instances have happened because of something idiotic I said.
I pull away from her—even though my body protests—and I drink in those perfect features of hers, catalogue the smile adorning her heart-shaped lips, the brown of her eyes that remind me of autumn, the freckles that dot her alabaster skin in vast constellations.
“You scared the shit out of me, Faye,” I tell her, running my hands over the gooseflesh on her arms.
She doesn’t seem to respond to my touch like she usually does, and her lifelessness nudges my anxiety into action.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said those things to you. I shouldn’t have run. I just felt so cornered, and I didn’t know what to do.”
“No. You don’t need to apologize. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have raised my voice at you, and I shouldn’t have tried to villainize you when everything was my fault. I was ashamed and angry and didn’t want to hear the truth. I thought I knew what was best for you, but I was wrong.”
I’m never going to go behind Faye’s back again. Because nothing in this world—and I mean nothing—is worth losing her. I’ve never been so wrecked in my life. I was fully ready to accept that she was gone. Not, like, dead gone. But just gone. Somewhere better, without me. And if she was, I wouldn’t have held it against her. I’ll always put her happiness first, even if that means sacrificing my own happiness.
My life doesn’t fucking exist if Faye’s not in it. Whenever she decides to leave this planet, I’m going to follow her, because there’s no way in hell I’m going to survive if I never see her face again, never hear her voice, never hold her.
There are inky streaks of mascara on her cheeks from crying, and the sight sits on my chest like an imposing anvil, too heavy to move. She’s been sitting in this empty rink for an hour, all by herself, in nothing but a tank top and shorts. I know her thoughts can be a dark limbo, a cesspool of negativity and self-deprecation, and I let her run out of the house after saddling her with too much emotion for one person to handle.
She shrugs. “It’s okay—”
“It’s not okay,” I assert, trying to soldier through the thick layer of bile in my mouth that has yet to recede. “None of this is okay. How Saxon treated you, how I treated you. I was supposed to protect you, and all I did was let you down.”
There’s not a lot of space on the ground for both of us, but I lower anyways, folding my legs in uncomfortably so Faye has enough room. She follows suit and sits down next to me, all of her limbs fitting proportionately between the front row of seats and the partition of plexiglass.
I don’t have a speech prepared, but I am ready to grovel—which, knowing me, is kind of guaranteed at this point.
I’ve never liked talking about my past. It doesn’t matter who it’s with. And no, I didn’t have the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking childhood. I didn’t witness a major death in the family. I didn’t suffer from abuse. I wasn’t forced to take care of myself from a young age. I always had a roof over my head and food on the table. My childhood was…fine. It was just lacking.
I hazard a glance at her, feel the backs of my eyes itch with tears. “I never had a good model of what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like. My parents fought a lot when I was younger. I thought it was something that every married couple went through, until they eventually grew further apart. I don’t really believe they were ever in love. They were cruel to each other, blaming the other when they had the chance, lying and manipulating when things didn’t go the way they wanted. They created this toxic environment that, as a child, I was completely oblivious to. I’d fall asleep to the sounds of them yelling, the crash of dishes or furniture or whatever was throwable in the space they were in. If a day passed where they weren’t screaming their lungs out at one another, I thought something was wrong.
“After they split, home life got a lot easier for me. But my relationships with other people…suffered. I was terrible to my girlfriends—unempathetic, uncaring. I didn’t know how to show compassion or how to think about anyone besides myself. I mean, you said yourself that I’m not necessarily the nicest person.”
“I didn’t say that exactly.”
I laugh for the first time in days—something I definitely didn’t think I’d be doing for a while. “It’s true. I don’t make an effort to understand people. I don’t care about anything unless it affects me. It’s what I grew up with, what I thought was the norm. I’d been content living a loveless life because I never really knew what love was. It wasn’t until you that I realized I’d been doing everything wrong.”
“I love you, Faye,” I profess, robbing the breath from her lungs.
Should I have said it sooner? Maybe. Do I wish I had done some big reveal, like flying her out to Ireland on a private jet to show her the flower field I bought that spells out her name? Yes. But all that matters is she knows it now.
Faye stares at me, eyes wide, mouth agape. I don’t want to put pressure on her to say it back, so I continue.
“When you told me not to reach out to Saxon, I didn’t listen to you. I was convinced that I was in the right, and I wasn’t willing to change my mind to understand where you were coming from. But in doing so, I fucked up what we had. I broke your trust…again. I believed that love was all about sacrifices instead of compromises.”
She pushes out a quiet breath, but it’s the only noise to be heard in the whole arena. A heavy exhale echoing off a surface of ice and skyscraping walls. I can see the gears turning in her head as she contemplates what she’s going to say.
“Yeah, you’ve been kind of a dick lately,” she mutters.
The corners of my lips buoy into a smile. There’s my Faye. Tells it like it is. Always holding me accountable. Never sugarcoating anything. “I have. I’m sorry. You’re the last person who deserves it.”
“I’m tired of being mad, Kit. I’m just tired of it all.”
“I know, Princess.”
She turns to fully face me, and I lift my thumb to brush the teary gunk out of the corner of her eye, the softness of her lashes kissing my skin. “How do I know you won’t hurt me again?”
Because I won’t let it happen. I’ll flip this entire world on its axis and condemn myself to an eternal life of hell if I ever hurt her again.
“I think hurt is a part of life,” I say, the arrhythmic warble of my heart now the loudest sound in the rink. “But I’ll never do anything to hurt you again. Not as long as I live, because I know that if I’m hurting, you’re hurting a thousand times worse than me.”
I start to withdraw my hand from the arc of her cheekbone, but she grabs it before I can get very far. Her touch lances heat through my body, searing enough to burn off my fingerprints and cauterize the open wounds left in the devastation of our fight. “What if I don’t forgive you?” she asks.
“I don’t expect you to. But I’ll work until I earn it, just like I said I would at the restaurant. Maybe it’ll take days, weeks, months. A year. I’ll work forever if that’s what it takes.”
“A year?”
“I have to start over, Faye. A clean slate. And I’m not afraid to.”
Faye goes from holding my hand to wrapping her arms around my torso, nearly knocking me off balance with the force of her hug. I jolt back and drape one arm over the expanse of her ribs, while my other arm keeps us both propped up.
“I love you,” she whispers into my neck.
She loves me. Not just with a “too,” either. Not just a response to my profession. A full statement. I love this girl so fucking much.
She’s warmed up a little from when I first found her, and her fragrant scent sparks every one of my synapses, whetting my appetite for her. I’m this close to using her goddamn shampoo myself just so I can have her smell on me at all times.
I want to kiss her. But maybe it’s too soon. I need to give her time.
My phone pings in my pocket, silencing my artillery fire of thoughts, and that’s when I realize I haven’t updated the group chat about Faye’s whereabouts. Fuck. Hayes is probably still losing his mind.
ME: Found her. She’s safe.
Faye leans over to peek at the screen just as a bunch of relieved texts start flooding in from the guys. My eyes aren’t fast enough to keep up with everything they’re saying.
As much as I want to keep her all to myself, I need to get her somewhere where the default temperature isn’t fifty degrees. “I should probably get you back to the house.”
She smashes her lips together in that demure way she does sometimes, and nothing could have prepared me for what comes out of her mouth next. “What if I don’t want to go back yet?”
